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THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 7, 2019
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Merchant Ivory adaptation of “Heat
and Dust ” came out in 1983 amid a flurry
of Raj nostalgia, flanked on the big
screen by “Gandhi” and “A Passage to
India,” and joined by the TV miniseries
“ The Jewel in the Crown” and “The Far
Pavilions.”
But by then the Booker Prize had
been awarded to Salman Rushdie’s
“Midnight’s Children” (1981), marking
a new era in literary portrayals of the
subcontinent. And Jhabvala had quit
India. She used the Booker Prize money
to move to New York, buying an apart­
ment in the Upper East Side building
where Ivory and Merchant resided.
Jhabvala felt instantly at home in the
city. While Europe would forever
“smell of blood”—she never returned
to Germany—New York was, she said,
“the most European place on earth I
know.” She rediscovered the Old World
of her youth in jars of pickled cucum­
bers and herring on deli counters; at
ballets and concerts; among the fur­
nishings and the accents of her past.
She spent the rest of her life based in
New York, albeit with a strong tie to
India through her beloved husband,
whom she called Jhab. Cyrus Jhabvala
maintained his architecture practice in
Delhi and Ruth spent winters with him
there; Cyrus visited New York regularly
until he retired and joined her in the
United States full time.
Jhabvala spoke little about her par­
ticular writing choices, but she often
described herself as a chameleon, writ­
ing about whatever milieu she inhab­
ited. Henceforth she set her fiction
largely in America, often among Eu­
ropean migrants. The later stories in
“At the End of the Century” introduce
readers to “prosperous émigrés from
various Central European countries,”
who “spoke only in English, though
their heavy accents made it sound not
unlike their native German”; and wan,
wealthy women equally at home in New
York, London, or Los Angeles. In some
ways, it must have helped Jhabvala’s lit­
erary reputation to move to New York
at this transitional moment for Indians
writing in English. Quite aside from
the politics of nationality (when Arun­
dhati Roy won the Booker, in 1997, she
was celebrated as the first “true Indian”
to do so), Jhabvala’s clipped social sat­
ire belongs to a world entirely different
from the sprawling canvases and the
linguistic innovation of Roy, Rushdie,
Amitav Ghosh, and Vikram Seth.Then,
too, India had little traction among
American readers; even James Ivory
confessed that he didn’t read her early
New Yorker stories, “ because at that point
I didn’t have much interest in India,
and they were Indian stories.” So a shift
in setting anchored her in an Ameri­
can literary marketplace.
The focus of her screenwriting
changed, too. In the late seventies, Jhab­
vala proposed an adaptation of Henry
James’s “ The Europeans” to Merchant
and Ivory, anticipating that the book
would be a good match for Ivory’s sen­
sibility.The ensuing series of classic ad­
aptations and historical dramas com­
pleted the team’s transformation from
makers of lighthearted India­themed
films into an Oscar­winning Holly­
wood brand.
Jhabvala’s fiction does not seem to
have benefitted similarly. She published
less during her decades in the United
States than she had in India, and fewer
novels in particular. Judging from their
quality, that was perhaps no bad thing.
In “Three Continents” (1987), a novel
about American naïfs caught up in a
Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh­style cult,
the characters get crushed under a te­
diously overextended plot. The book
seems to have originated in an idea for
a screenplay, and its failure as a novel
underscores the sense that Jhabvala’s
irony and restraint flourished better in
compact frames.
Though some of the American sto­
ries deliver flashes of the Jhabvala econ­
omy—New York captured in snatches
of “street smells, petrol fumes, leaking
gas pipes, newly poured tar, pretzels,
mangoes from Mexico, Chinese noo­
dles, overblown flowers”—her satirical
edge, so keen in the Indian fiction, is
dulled. Maybe it ’s harder to convey
ironic detachment when you feel more
at home. There’s an evanescence to
many of these Western tales, as if Jhab­
vala’s writing turned its face away from
the sun and grew obscure. Two of the
central characters in the collection’s
title story fade entirely by the time it
ends; in the parting scene, they appear
only in a photograph, “a shimmer of
two figures in light­coloured clothes
on the verge of disappearing from sight.”
It’s in the later stories in this vol­
ume that one becomes aware of how
much triangulation pervades Jhabvala’s
work. It’s not just classic love triangles,
though there are many of those—best
portrayed in the collection’s final story,
“ The Judge’s Will,” in which a widow
discovers the existence of her husband’s
longtime mistress. Jhabvala is an art­
ful geometer, and she skews her angles
boldly. Consider “Ménage,” in which
a daughter finds out that her mother
and aunt share a lover, before sleeping
with him herself. Or “Pagans,” in which
two sisters sleep with the husband of
one, and take up the same young In­
dian protégé. Or “Great Expectations,”
the puzzling account of an American
woman who becomes a surrogate mother
qua partner to a self­involved divorcée
and her adolescent daughter. These
stories, set primarily in New York, are
among the weakest in the collection—
or maybe it’s that by the time one gets
to them the pattern appears formulaic.
The obvious analogy is with Jhab­
vala’s own triangulated life—Eu­
rope, India, America—and it prompts
the perennial question posed of dias­
poric, post­colonial, mixed­up, or mi­
grant writers. Where does she fit? The
Library of Congress classification sys­
tem places Jhabvala alongside Indian­
origin writers in English, but as a Con­
tinental European writing in English she
could just as well have been shelved with
Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov.
It’s equally tricky to situate Jhabvala in
the binary of power and powerlessness
favored by much post­colonial criticism.
As Salman Rushdie once pointed out,
“Looked at from the point of view that
literature must be nationally connected
and even committed, it becomes simply
impossible to understand the cast of mind
and vision of a rootless intellect like Jhab­
vala’s.” No intellect can be truly rootless;
it always takes hold in the soil of in­
fluence and experience. But it’s useless
to expect writers to be pine trees, lined
up neatly in a forest, when many are more
like banyans, whose dangling aerial roots
can make them into a forest of one.
The quintessential outsider—“Once
you’re a refugee, I guess you’re always a
refugee,” Jhabvala said—she sometimes
leaves the reader of these stories crav­
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